Delegates Who Whip

A City That's Trying To Stroke

Delegates Who Whip, And A City That's Trying To Stroke

July 14, 1992|By COLIN McENROE; Courant Columnist

NEW YORK — Dear Diary:

Here's the good news from the Democratic National Convention:

"There are plenty of whips and enough whipping going on," state Rep. Irving Stolberg of New Haven assured the Connecticut delegation, moments after U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro had attempted to familiarize them with one of the most complex hierarchies of whipping -- including someone called a "cluster whip" -- since the Spanish Inquisition. DeLauro herself is some kind of Very Important Whip at the convention and may not even have to whip anybody except other whips.

Merrick R. Alpert, a young Day, Berry & Howard lawyer, explained patiently that he is one of three "line whips" in a "1-1-3" whipping formation (the Democrats are apparently going with zone whipping this year, instead of the more traditional man-to-man).

Why all this whipping at a convention where there is all the suspense and swashbuckling intrigue of an Oddfellows meeting? Because the Democrats want everybody to know that they are happy and united, so it is necessary to lash everybody into a state of joyous oneness.

Actually, the idea here is to achieve an exquisite balance between whipping and stroking. Stroking the political art of telling people how happy you are to see them. Whipping is the political art of telling people to do as they're told.

New York City itself is helping out with the stroking. The city is trying to send a new, friendlier message to the world. So where the old message might be summed up as "Shut the (bleep) up," the new message is more on the order of "Please, Shut up." The city has taken pains to let the conventioneers know they can have a wonderful stay in New York as long as they follow a few simple rules:

Don't walk alone.

Don't take subways, buses, cabs, rickshaws or hovercrafts.

Affix all valuables to your person with NASA-approved adhesives.

Don't wear orange (which, for some reason, provokes the

mutants).

Don't talk to Larry King.

During the week, the cheerful burghers of New York will attempt to find things for the delegates to do. Nice things. Because it would never do to have precinct captains from Oklahoma and Illinois marauding around, attending "Live Fat Men in Their Underpants" shows on Times Square and consorting with followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (who were gathered outside Central Park Sunday singing such Unification Church hymns as "This Land is Your Land").

It should be said, in all fairness, that New York is trying very hard. There are scores of policemen everywhere, and they are almost eerily cheerful. But they did not protect me, on Monday, from the man in the spangled costume who kept chasing people down the street, stamping his feet at them and yelling about Bolivia.

Nor were they especially helpful when a street-cleaning truck snagged a television cable on Eighth Avenue and drove off with it, causing it to pop loose from its mooring and whip (there's that word again) along the blacktop at an alarming speed, slithering like a black mamba at the ankles of pedestrians.

There were about 20 policemen there, all of them as frightened and puzzled as the rest of us. The truck stopped at a light moments before the cable would have popped, doubtless showering the crowd with a sparky apparition in the shape of Peter Jennings's bald spot (which, by the way, will soon be the subject of a major National Enquirer report, one of their correspondents told me Sunday night).

The Connecticut delegation arrived Sunday afternoon and was hustled off for the first session of stroking at Barney's, a renowned New york clothier in the Chelsea district. Although the name might conjure up images of an old-timey place where little pot-bellied men sit all day with tape measures draped around the their necks, leaping up occasionally to yell "Fawty-two long" at men who walk in the store, Barney's is a very elegant place that sells expensive suits, as well as such life-affirming accessories as $100 egg cups.

It's quite possible the store has never seen such a concentration of unBarneyishly dressed persons as the delegation and its press corps, many of whom are strongly influenced by some of the fashion trends coming out of Eastern Europe these days.

I asked Barney's owner Bob Pressman and his wife, Holly, to give Kennedyesque state Comptroller William Curry a few fashion tips. Holly Pressman, thirtysomething, smiled graciously at Curry's snappy blazer-chino ensemble and said, "I think that's a great way to dress. My sons dress that way."

Monday, though, was all business, as the delegation convened in the morning to hear longtime Clinton insider Betsey Wright forthrightly admit that Bill Clinton is one the most decent, open-minded, forgiving people she has ever met. In a complicated bit of reasoning, Wright explained that Clinton sometimes "comes off as being slick and calculating because deep inside he's very private."